Formatting Plain Text Email

Plain text email is readable and understandable from the most powerful computer with the biggest monitor to the cell phone with a 4 line display. It doesn’t contain malware. And it doesn’t burn out your eyes with color. But you have to make sure to take care when formatting plain text email.

How to Go About Formatting Plain Text Email Correctly

Really, there’s one thing you will want to do before sending out your email. You need to make sure you have a carriage return character after every 60 or so characters.

Because some of your subscriber’s email readers may alter your email to shorter lines.

You can transform your paragraphs of text into short lines, free of charge, by using the online tool at formatit.com. Simply paste your article into the online form, choose how wide you want the lines, and it will do the work.

How wide to make each line is a personal choice, and the narrower the column of text, the easier it is to read. That’s why newspapers are divided up into narrow columns of text.

That’s It!

You now know everything you need to know about formatting plain text email while it would take a large book to describe all the rules and exceptions for formatting HTML email. That’s because there is no standard for HTML email, and every email reader and every online mail system does things a little bit differently.

So there are some advantages to following the KISS principle of Keep It Simple Stupid with emails to groups of people.

Mail-list.com has an option that will automatically format your outgoing emails to the width that you choose. So you can just write your email and send, without worrying about this little detail. Our system will also translate the “curly quotes” from Microsoft Word documents into “straight quotes” that are readable in everybody’s email reader.